Environmental Humanities: News

wE-unions is an interactive, playful, & all-invited event about environment, public space, justice, and community. Designed and led by students in the spring 2015 Atelier course, "Performing Environmental Stories," with professors Jenny Price and Kelly Baum.
Monday, May 4, 2015 at 4 p.m. on Frist Campus Center Lawn

Panelists: Michael Graziano, Laura Kahn, Aude Teillant
Antibiotics were first massed-produced in the 1940s. Their ability to fight and kill bacteria revolutionized medicine and had profound effects on everything from agriculture to war. After less than 80 years, however, these miracle drugs are failing. Resistant infections kill hundreds of thousands of people around the world each year, and there are now dozens of so-called

February 24, 2015
It s 2015 Do you know where your artists are?
Increasingly, they’re heading out of the studio and into public spaces. They’re taking over sidewalks, revitalizing urban rivers, redesigning streets to be more people-friendly, and remediating industrial lots. As 21st-century artists partner with planners, engineers, and urban communities, they’re becoming major players in the efforts to remake and revitalize cities and neighborhoods.

The rise of postcolonial ecocriticism has resulted in an expanded discussion about how we theorize the relationship between people and place. This talk addresses the depiction of soil in rather literal and material terms by exploring how Caribbean artists and writers have called attention to the political and the aesthetic implications of making dirt, or waste, visible. Symbolically speaking, waste is a remainder, and can be understood as the uncanny, as deteriorating matter, as a figure of natu

Panel of current and former Barron Fellows discussing the field of Environmental Humanities.
Rarely do photographers, artistic directors, musicians, novelists, poets, scientists, engineers, and scholars in religion, philosophy, and literature come together for two full-days to explore an emerging field of mutual interest. Such a unique gathering took place during Princeton University’s conference “Environmental Humanities in a Changing World.”

Growing up on a farm in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey and witnessing the dramatic loss of farmland to housing developments and shopping malls ignited visiting professor Ken Hiltner's early and life-long interest in the environment which he later married with his passion for English literature.
"My initial interest in the environment comes from growing up on my family's farm in southern New Jersey where I gained an appreciation for open-space," said Hiltner. "Sadly, the landscape

Fifty years ago, C. P. Snow delivered a famous lecture on "The Two Cultures," the sciences and the humanities. Visting Barron Professor Ken Hiltner examines whether these two cultures can coexist and work together today.

Environmental awareness comes in many forms. Often, it is shaped by an understanding of science or public policy, but it also can be informed by religion. Rarely, however, do all three of these perspectives intersect at once—and that is the challenge two Yale University professors, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, have been addressing for the past three decades.

In this outgrowth of the original course, Cullen and Lemonick review how, even in light of the vast media attention given this subject, many people are still ill-informed and skeptical about climate change.

"People are part of the climate system: not only are we consumers of fossil fuels and removers of forests, but we also interact with the information about the consequences of our actions in ways that, although complex and sometimes counter-intuitive, can be understood with the help of disciplines that study how we tick.' says Robert Socolow.

The paper Climate change: helping nature survive the human response, published in the scientific journal Conservation Letters, looks at efforts to both reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and potential action that could be taken by people to adapt to a changed climate and assesses the potential impact that these could have on global ecosystems.

In a collaboration melding art with science,
climate researchers and other members of the
Princeton University community joined forces
with The Civilians to help create
a work-in-progress about global climate change.

Now in its third year of funding, the Grand Challenges Initiative, administered by PEI in collaboration with the Woodrow Wilson School and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has created a diverse research and scholarship endeavor.

While exploring the Panama Canal in a small tourist boat, Steve Cosson and Michael Friedman were startled by a massive container ship suddenly passing by, rocking them violently in its wake. Painted on the hull in Chinese characters, its name was boldly inscribed as "The Great Immensity."

Now in its third year of funding, the Grand Challenges Initiative, administered by PEI in collaboration with the Woodrow Wilson School and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has created a diverse research and scholarship endeavor.

In the fall of 2009, the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the Lewis Center for the Arts initiated a yearlong collaborative project lying at the intersection of the environment and the performing arts.

When the more than 100 students who completed internships this summer through the Princeton Environmental Institute and the Grand Challenges Program returned to campus, they had at least one more commitment.

As a culminating experience, they were required to report on what they learned during their experiences with faculty, research labs, governmental agencies, nongovernmental organizations, nonprofit organizations and industry enterprises in more than 20 countries. On two Fridays this fall,

The Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) will host a symposium and conference Wednesday through Friday, April 29-May 1, to address challenges related to agriculture and climate change as the global population expands.

An interdisciplinary group of scholars will examine the ethical dimensions of the challenge presented by climate change in a fall lecture series sponsored by the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the University Center for Human Values.

A conference on environmental justice scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, April 28-29, will cap a yearlong collaboration between the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the Center for African American Studies that has enabled Princeton students and scholars to thoroughly explore the topic.

Princeton faculty members have been invited to submit proposals by Monday, Sept. 17, for seed grants for projects under a new teaching and research program focused on important issues that share dominant environmental, political, social and engineering dimensions

Ruthie Schwab, Ben Elga and Diana Bonaccorsi are spending their summer among rows of aromatic herbs, lines of leafy greens and mounds of sprouting vegetables, all contained in a small patch of land behind the University's Forbes College.

The earth is growing warmer, thanks to elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases, and the vast majority of scientists now believe that human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, is primarily responsible.